Weird Flash Fiction

The Fridge

Stan used his fridge like a normal person. He put things in. He took things out. The things he took out were the things he put in. Everything was as it should be.

In the morning, Stan opened his fridge and found that the milk was gone. Completely gone. He searched the rest of the fridge and the kitchen and even the cereal cabinet just in case he did that thing where you try to put the milk away next to the cornflakes. No milk.

Maybe he used it all and forgot. That could happen. He checked the trash and the recycling. No milk carton. He hadn't taken out the trash in a few days, and he would have noticed if the milk had been missing for that long. It simply vanished.

The milk was truly missing, and the possible reasons weren't good. Either he disposed of the milk in some way like taking it outside or forgetting it in the living room, he'd gone mad and there was never any milk at all, or someone else took it.

He felt sure he would remember something like hiding the milk behind the cushions. He just didn't feel crazy enough for insanity to be the cause, and even if he'd gone insane, putting milk on cereal didn't seem like a reasonable hallucination to have. Which meant that someone else took it, but that didn't make any more sense.

Stan lived in a cabin in the mountains, dozens of miles from the nearest home. It was winter, the snow was piled higher than the door, and he had not bothered to clear a way to the road. His home simply wasn't accessible.

He decided that he couldn't figure out the answer to the question, but he was still hungry and hadn't eaten breakfast. That was within his power. He picked out his cereal and opened the fridge, mostly out of habit but partly just to make sure he hadn't missed the milk.

The milk was gone. Still. But in the space it had occupied, Stan found a container of soymilk. He shook it. It hadn't been opened. It was not what he had been putting on his cereal the past few days. The milk was definitely missing, and the soymilk came out of nowhere.

Maybe someone else switched them out while he was searching the other rooms. It was possible. But the fridge was loud and the cabin was small, so he was confident that he would have heard it open. The soymilk had materialized out of thin air inside the fridge.

Stan was still hungry and still couldn't figure out how it all worked, so he used the soymilk on his cereal instead. He did not understand why anyone would intentionally choose it over real milk. But it was better than nothing.

He ate his cereal and thought about the painting he was working on. He was stuck on what kind of environment to paint. It felt like he'd already painted everything. Nothing excited him.

He opened the fridge to put the soymilk away, and something else had changed. His vegetable drawer no longer contained carrots, celery, and lettuce. It contained something else that he didn't recognize. It looked like a vegetable, with its smooth skin and oblong shape, but he had never seen a blue vegetable so it was hard to be sure.

How had it changed again? And in such a short time? He hadn't actually been looking at the fridge, but he was close and he would have heard it if it opened. Maybe it had been in his vegetable drawer earlier, and he just hadn't noticed? That seemed the most likely. He just hadn't noticed any of it. That was all.

After a morning of uninspired painting, Stan decided to cook lunch. Maybe that would help. He opened the fridge. Everything was different. Not only the soymilk and the vegetables, but all of his ingredients were gone, and replaced by familiar and unfamiliar items. Butter, although not the brand he purchased. Bread, but not the pre-sliced kind he liked to get. Then there were unfamiliar condiments and foreign fruits and meat that looked like chicken but also salmon at the same time.

Obviously he'd gone crazy. That was the only explanation. It simply wasn't possible for someone to be sneaking around switching out foods, and it wasn't that he hadn't noticed the items in his fridge earlier. He was insane. All of it was really his food, it just didn't seem like it. That was all.

Since he was still hungry for lunch, he made himself a chicken sandwich with the ingredients that didn't look like his. It tasted fine. A little different, but it was good. Which was fortunate. If you're going to hallucinate a difference in food, you at least hope it tastes nice.

Maybe it was a good thing. He'd been stuck in his art, feeling too routine, too uninspired. This was his brain helping him try something new. That was it. He'd make use of it. He spent the afternoon painting, and it was better with the change of pace, but it still wasn't quite right. It wasn't quite enough.

He'd make dinner with his imagined ingredients again. It helped before. It would help again. By the next day he would be full of ideas. He opened the fridge.

The contents of the fridge were the same as they had been at lunch, but the fridge was different. The back of the fridge was a fridge door. He saw it close but didn't quite see what was on the other side. He had to know.

He took everything out of the fridge and took out the shelves to make enough room. He crawled into the fridge and pushed the new door open to see the other side.

It was exactly what he was looking for.